Fully agree. Have seen a few teams fail trying to go distributed with their employee #21. That person is guaranteed to be left out of all informal communication in the office.
Successful distributed teams have that modus operandi built into their DNA from ground up.

As a member of a remote team acquired by a company that is obsessed with their physical meeting rooms, I agree wholeheartedly. 5 remote people struggling to hear 20 people in a room on speaker phone has the tables tipped enough that you can't help but drift further away.